Off Script

Donald Trump won election as the 45th President of the United States by studying American political stagecraft and learning what helped previous candidates succeed and doomed others to failure. A figure on the periphery of campaigns for decades, he glided down the Trump Tower escalator on June 16, 2015, declared his candidacy and took his place, permanently, as an actor in the country’s greatest spectacle. Twenty-eight years earlier, at the dawn of what Josh King calls “The Age of Optics” in OFF